Black-Hawk XR5 with 3 64 GB SSD's in RAID 0

I am awaiting delivery of a Black-Hawk XR5 system. Primary specs are:


Intel® XEON QUAD X3360 (2.83GHz/45nm/1333MHz/12MB)

8192MB High Speed DDR2 Extreme Performance Memory

192GB OCZ SSD2 Solid State Storage RAID 0 (3 x 64GB SSD)

50GB HD Blu-Ray-RW / DVD-RW / CD-RW DL Next Gen. Burner

SLI Dual nVIDIA Geforce 8800M GTX 1GB DDR3 X-TREME GPU

ExpressCard Advanced HSDPA High Speed Internet Connection

Advanced Digital / Analog Hybrid TV Tuner + Remote Control

Microsoft® Windows Vista Ultimate 64 + XP PRO 32 Dual Boot Config

Office® 2007 PRO


Before ordering, I could not fInd much in the way of recent reviews out there about the Black-Hawk with its currently available options, though PCMicroWorks seems to be generally in high regard, and its sales support has so far been first rate. Anybody else have any experience with the Black-Hawk congigured with SSD's in Raid 0? Where can I find recent detailed reviews by Black-Hawk owners of the short-term and long-term impressions of the actual real-world performance of their machines? Hope more Black-Hawk owners will post their impressions, any known issues with the Black-Hawk or this configuration, and any tips for tweaking the best performance out of this machine.

 

you are the first one I heard of 8gb ram and 3xSSD. how much it cost you? like 10K?

 

Thats wicked... but I do not know if its worth it.... since SSD prices will drop dramatically in another year.

Xeon (quads) is the same as a Core 2 Quad.... just the name pretty much, not worth it unless if you want bragging rights.... however, the stability might be an issue (not sure yet), but Clevo does NOT officially support Xeon's in the D901C.

8GB of RAM only useful for those working with lots of memory paging tasks (10MegaPixel+ pictures or textures in Photoshop/3ds max/Maya, or other memory intensive work).

SDDs in RAID-0 great.... just make sure you have a data redundancy or all will be lost if one fails.

 

Oh as for reviews, this notebook has MANY reviews.... its a Clevo D900C/D901C (aka. Sager 9260/9261/9262, Pro-Star 919x, Black-Hawk, Comanche, etc..)

All vendors name it differently.... read Clevo Guide for more info.

 

With max warranty options, expedited processing and delivery, an external drive, and most of the other available bells and whistles, about $12.5k, but fortunately it's for business use as well as personal use and not all of that is an out-of-pocket expense to me. The upgrade and trade-in aspects of the Platinum warranty helped make this an attractive system under these particular circumstances.

 

Wow, nice. I wrote off my notebook for business use as well, but it only totaled about $3000.

Please give us your impressions and maybe an official review of the beast.

I think that is, hands down, the most fully pimped out notebook (in terms of raw performance) on this planet.

You would get some crazy props with a review.

 

Thanks! That helps!

 

Thanks! Will certainly post a reveiw once received and setup. Delivery delayed 3 days awaiting graphics card--overnite delivery now expected June 25.

 

Wow that's an incredible setup. Congrats on the purchase! Probably blows most high-end desktops out of the water!

 

^^ exactly.

Most of the highest of the high end desktop owners would drool over this rig.

 

I do work with high res photos in Photoshop, and also work with several other memory-intensive apps. PCMW strongly recommended the XEON, and the cost difference was small in the overall scheme of this purchase, so I went with the recommendation. Have external backup drive, and most of my critical data is also backed up via office network, so I felt RAID 0 was a viable choice.

 

Nice... seems like you got your bases covered.

Can't wait to here from you when you get it.

 

I wish I could afford a spec like that


Enjoy mate

 

Thanks much. Hope it lives up to expectations!

 

I hope so too.

Although that is such a high-end early adopter rig that it might not be immune to initial bugs (from the CPU and HDDs mainly... the other components are standard)

 

Thankfully, it's not all my money!

 

8g ram + 1g video ram = 9g total;
don't know if p965 chip set can use all that tho.
But it is definitely a beast!

 

I know--one of the reasons I was trying to find reviews of something close to this configuration was to see what intiial bugs (and fixes) were turning up. I did see that the OCZ ssd's have some good reviews out there, though not specific to this system or configuration. Indeed, I found very little info anywhere on SSD's in RAID 0.

 

Went with 8g RAM for the Vista Ultimate 64 side of the dual boot configuration. Not really useful on the XP side, but was hoping it would add some potential pop on the Vista 64 side.

 

Incidentally, i also have a Delkin Devices 16GB ExpressCard PRO SSD (PCI Express, 49 MB/s read, 27 MB/s write )--any thoughts on whether using that for ReadyBoost would have any utility with this set-up?

 

Not with 8gb of RAM. ReadyBoost won't make any difference, IMO.

 

Thanks much. That was my suspicion, but i am using it on a prior machine and was trying to decide if it could add anything other than extra storage on the new system.

 

WARNING! Irrelevant math straight ahead. Enter at your own risk!

Ok. So, assuming that your effective income tax rate is 30%, if it was 100% business, then going out-of-pocket $12,500 would reduce otherwise payable taxes by $3,750 (assuming immediate write-off instead of amortization over several years), so net you're out-of-pocket $8,750. If your business use is only 75%, then the tax savings drops to $2,812.50, leaving you net out-of-pocket about $9,687.50.

Of course that neglects state and/or local income taxes. If you have the unfortunate misfortune of living in NYC, and assuming your effective federal rate is 35% (unlikely, since the graduated bracket system means that effective tax rates approach the highest rate - 35% - asymptotically), that would give you a total federal/state/local effective rate of about 47%. On that basis, you'd be net out-of-pocket $6,625 with 100% business use, and $8,093.75 with 75% business use.

If you've got 100% business in NYC, that almost becomes a pseudo-reasonable price to pay. Gotta love them socialists in NYC - never saw an economy they didn't want to kill.

Dear Readers: No complaining; you were warned.

 

Wow that is one expensive system, but it will probably boot to Vista in like 2 SECONDS!
You can forget about hibernate...

 

How much of a difference would it be for 4gb to 8gb in vista? Gaming? Autodesk applications (maya, 3dsmax)

 

No difference in Vista and games.. For maya and 3dsmax it really depends on what you do.. (sorry for that obvious and boring statement) At least you can use it all, which you can't in any game i know of..

 

tomshardware had an article when 8 g matters...

 

Any chance you might still have a link to that article?

 

I assume he referred to this article: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/vista-workshop,1775.html

 

Don't disagree with your math, but a significant hardware expense allowance from my firm is what made this purchase feasible.

 

That alone might make this purchase worthwhile. Long boot-up wait times drive me nuts! Reducing it to 2 seconds would probably save me 5 -10 percent on my average daily blood pressure readings. I would love for it to be that fast, but I'll report whatever it turns out to be.

 

Yup, I cannot wait to hear about your king of kings notebook.

 

I am not 100% sure (kinda sucks still looking for reference material) but I think the Intel 965 chipset with the Intel ROC caps out at 90MB/s due to an Intel design issue. You might not see great performance with the three SSD's although it will still be better than any physical drive combination, excluding 2.5" SAS drives.

 

Was not aware of that limitation--if you find any reference material verifying that please post a link. Thanks.

 

I... HATE... YOU.... in a loving sort of way... i had to clean drool off the edge of my mouth cuz of you.... 3 SSDs... and xeon quad... and the video cards of course... jeez lol

 

lol doubt it, I think they would laugh cause they could have a better system for 3-4k maybe 5k if they are too lousy to search a little bit

 

yea but they cant carry that power anywhere in a briefcase at will!!!

 

yup, this is raw power in a mobile design.

 

i agree its a really cool notebook but 4 times the price is far from meaning 4 time the performance particularly compared to a desktop

 

If I ever allowed my blood alcohol level to drop low enough to see myself clearly, I'd probably hate myself too.

 

Yeah, but I work from home most afternoons, and carrying a desktop back and forth to the tiki bar beside my pool gets old.

 

I understand the argument, and if I was looking solely for the maximum gaming performance at the best overall price, I would probably go with a desktop. But if I want the power and performance of a desktop to take with me when working from home or on the road, to run all my memory-intensive work-related applications, to work with large databases poolside over a vpn connection, and still have the ability to do some serious gaming on the same machine, a high-end notebook is a much better fit. The Dell XPS m1710 I have been using serves in this role, but this new machine should run circles around that one.

 

Exactly, if I had that kind of cash I wouldn't bother getting a desktop either. I don't know, it's a personal preference I guess. Even now, I wouldn't want to go back to using desktops.

 

I dont know if i had that money i would get a crazy fast desktop and a good laptop. I think bother arguments are right if you have the money and need to be on the move its good to have a nice laptop. Laptops still cant touch the performance of a desktop i mean a high end one. I just got done building a really nice desktop. QX9770 OC to 4G, 780I motherboard, 8G of corsair Dominator OC to 1150, two 300G raptors on raid 0, two GTX280 in SLI Overclocked to 690, in the coolmaster cosmos s case. i dont think i left anything. Im also looking for a good laptop for gaming/college/photoshop/a little audio recording and mixing.Probably geting the M860TU cas need some portabilty. I would spend a little more on my desktop cas you can get better performance as well as price/performance ratio and you can upgrade it. Then get a good laptop that meets my needs but only spend enough that when i buy a new one in 2 or 3 years it doesnt hurt to bad. In the end it comes down to what you want and need. Doesnt matter what anyone else says.

 

Agreed. At the end of the day, as you say, what matters is the compromise you arrive at between what you need and what you want, and the constraints on each. In my case, while I would love to have the freedom to build a sprawling high-end desktop that, maybe, took up a whole corner of my apartment, and then a sleek little laptop I could run around with that could do browsing/doc editing/email, I cannot for the simple reason that my living arrangements do not permit that sort of desktop, primarily for two reasons: (1) I have a 3 y.o. daughter who, being a curious toddler, would almost certainly want to "explore" my desktop in ways that would be .... detrimental to its continued functionality, and (2) my wife raises holy heck whenever messy tech stuff gets left around the apartment in plain view. The only amicable resolution is a notebook with as much oomph as possible that comes as close as possible to being a desktop while retaining the ability to completely close it up and store it away in one small package.

 

I checked back with dvnation about the intel chipset. They seem to have changed their info regarding intel but only to confirm that the x38 chipset works fine with their SSD's http://www.dvnation.com/ssdfaq.html The original info they had was that the intel chipsets did not allow full speed transfers. Might need to contact them because they do offer a D901C configured with SSD's and Raid and what kind of performance they have had with them. I would really like to know if you can get in the 250-350MB/s range with three drives in Raid 0. They have benchmarks for 2 drives in Raid 0 and 3 drives in Raid 5 and both are above 200MB/s although it is with one of the best Raid controllers you can buy.

 

I don't know about drive-throttling on Intel chipsets generally; however, the P965 chipset - the chipset in the D901C - has a max FSB clock of 1066 whereas the x38 chipset has an FSB clock of 1333, so the x38 would most likely be faster than the P965 in any event.

 

When you convert the 1066 FSB to MB/s (1066*64)/8 = 8528 MB/s you can see that there is not much bottle neck between the north bridge and the CPU. The Sata 3 bus can handle 300MB/s per channel and up to 15 devices with a port multiplier per channel (an effective way to stack drives for maximum throughput per channel) This is from the Intel's datasheet on the ICH8R chipset
"The Intel® Matrix Storage Technology offers several diverse options for RAID
(redundant array of independent disks) to meet the needs of the end user. AHCI
support provides higher performance and alleviates disk bottlenecks by taking
advantage of the independent DMA engines that each SATA port offers in ICH8.
• RAID Level 0 performance scaling up to 4 drives, enabling higher throughput for
data intensive applications such as video editing."
So in our example we have three drives linked to one channel each and throughput is around 100MB/s per-drive we should see near 300MB/s (depending upon striping size) for three drives. But I have only read that there might be a problem with Intel's MST regarding SSD's and the problem would be most likely in the south bridge. I will try to get in touch with dvnation and see what they think. Still all in all it will be a kick a** rig!!

 

Best reply ever.

 

Damn, the fully decked D901C , and RAID 0 with SSDs?


Enjoy virtually the fastest laptop around